Chai Tea Recipe

Fall has started to settle in around here- the leaves are gorgeous! One of my favorite things to do in the fall is make chai tea. Not only is it delicious to drink when it's cold outside, but it soothes the inevitable sore throat I get AND makes the entire house smell like heaven! The great thing about making your own chai at home is that you can make it exactly the way you want it. You can take my recipe and, using the same method, tweak the ingredients to your taste.

The first thing to note is that chai tea is kindof like chili in the States- everyone has their own recipe that they love, and there are a million different ways to make it. So please don't take the ingredients in my recipe as a hard-and-fast rule- mix and match the flavors you love and experiment until you find the blend you love!

The ingredients I use in my chai are: cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and black tea (I add sugar and milk later too). Other ingredients commonly included in chai are star anise, cloves, and black pepper. I like to use decaf black tea so that I can drink it any time of day (I always make a big batch and keep it in the fridge for later)- I just get basic tea at the grocery store.

I've found that the key to making chai is using whole spices. I used to use powdered versions of all of these spices and it just wasn't the same. I've found whole cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks are cheapest at my local Indian food market, but most health food stores (Whole Foods etc) have them as well. The nice thing is a little goes a long way, so one bag will last you a long while. And I guarantee whole cardamom anywhere is cheaper than ground- have you seen how expensive a bottle of ground cardamom is?!? It boggles my mind.... Fresh ginger is easy to find at almost any grocery store, and I keep what I don't use in the freezer.

To get a nice, spicy, full-flavored chai, the spices need time to simmer, I start off by cracking open the cardamom pods (you don't have to but you'll get a lot more flavor this way) and shaving off some pieces of ginger with a knife, and putting all 3 spices into a pot full of water, then I bring it to a boil over high heat (for a medium-sized pot, I tend to use 3-4 cinnamon sticks, a handful of cardamom, and 4-5 pieces of ginger). 

Once the water is boiling, add the tea bags. I usually use around 6 tea bags, since I'm making a huge batch. If you want a stronger tea flavor, boiling longer is NOT the answer- you want to add more tea bags. Reduce to medium heat to keep it at a slow boil, and steep the tea bags with the spices for the number of minutes it says on the tea bags- usually somewhere around 5 minutes (if you leave the tea bags in too long it will turn bitter, so set a timer for this part!). If your tea bags have strings with little paper tags on them, cut off the tags before putting them in the pot. That way you don't have to worry about them bubbling around the pot and getting paper in your chai.

Remove the tea bags from the pot and reduce to low heat while the spices continue to simmer. If you want to prevent the tea from reducing too much, cover the pot. If you, like me, want your house to smell like heaven, leave it uncovered (trust me, it's worth it). At this point, the longer you simmer, the stronger the spices will be. Taste it every so often until it has the spiciness level you're looking for (and keep in mind that the flavor will get a little bit stronger if you keep it for later in the fridge, and the flavor will obviously get weaker if you add sweetener or milk later). 

Once your spice blend is to your liking, turn off the heat. Pour out the tea over a strainer into a bowl (or sealed container if you're keeping extra in the fridge). Don't throw away the spices! I leave them in the strainer for a while to let most of the water drip off, then put it all in a small dish in my living room for some amazing potpourri! I also reuse the cinnamon sticks in my next batch. They'll last through many rounds of boiling.

I like to add my sweetener to each cup so that if guests want some they can adjust it to their taste, but if you want to add sweetener to the whole batch now is the time: I use sugar (brown or white), but honey or other sweeteners will work too. I'll warn you- if you're used to American coffeeshop chai, you're probably going to need a LOT of sweetener to get the same sweetness.You can also counteract a batch that got too spicy with some extra sweetener. 

If you're saving some for later, definitely leave the milk out until you're ready to drink. I use whole milk and use a frother to make it more of a "latte" but that is really not necessary for a good chai- just get it heated through in a kettle or microwave. Sit down with your steaming cup of chai and breath in the best of fall! 

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Organizing Your Teacher Closet on a Budget (part 1: small items)

How many teachers have impeccably clean, organized, streamlined classrooms, but have mountains of disorganized junk just behind their closet doors? It's hard to keep a classroom closet organized. As elementary teachers we have so many little things that we need to have on hand but don't use year-round, and we often need to get them out of sight quickly and end up just throwing things in the closet without having time to figure out where it goes. I've recently come up with a few new tricks for organizing my materials in my classroom closet that have helped me maintain the organization through the last-minute pulling stuff out and putting stuff away, and I'm really excited about how well they're working (and how easy they were to implement)! Today I want to share what I'm using to help organize all of those small items- manipulatives, game pieces, etc- that need to be organized and easily accessible in my closet.

I have a few large shelving units in my closet. I'm grateful to have the storage but big shelves are definitely not generally conducive to storing the types of things I need to keep in my closet, which are mostly small items that will quickly get buried and mixed up on a large shelf. They key with organizing small items in larger spaces, whether that's a drawer, counter space, table, or shelf, is to get smaller containers. The problem is that we as teachers need LOTS of containers if we're actually going to organize all the little things we have, and that can get expensive. Here are some of the cheap items I found that are working perfectly for my closet!

The best things to use, if you can find them cheaply, are drawer organizers. I found mine on super-clearance at Marshall's- any discount store with home items, or dollar stores, or good places to keep an eye out for these (mine were $2 for each set so I spent a total of $6). The nice thing is you get lots of small bins in one, usually in different sizes, and often you can arrange them in whatever configuration best fits your space. I am using these for my composition manipulatives (like lego blocks and mini erasers), solfege stickers, and game pieces for some of the games I use for centers. 

Another great solution that I just recently came up with is the mini accordion folder that I got at the Dollar Tree (I've seen them at other stores like Walmart as well for the same price). I saw this rainbow one last year and bought it, knowing I would eventually find some use for it (although I didn't expect to wait a whole year to come up with a great way to use it...). I've now organized all of the small card decks that I use for centers and class activities, especially to review note names and instruments (most of which I made myself). I also have decks of cards that I got at the Target dollar spot that show musical instruments and flags from around the world- I use these for simple sorting activities in centers and small groups. I had previously had them stacked up in piles on the shelf, and I always ended up knocking over the piles and getting the decks all mixed up with each other. Now I can quickly slip them into their own slots and pull out just the ones I need without getting them mixed up! 

I bought these dip trays at the Dollar Tree to use for sorting activities (like the ones using the decks or cards I mentioned before, where students sort the instrument cards into families of instruments, or sort the country flags into continents etc). When I use them for sorting, I write the category names on the different compartments with wet erase marker and then wipe the off afterwards so I can reuse them. I recently, however, figured out another great use for them when they are sitting in my closet: sorting individual sets of manipulatives! When I am going to be using composition manipulatives in class, I usually need to have several sets of the same items so individual students or small groups can each have the same set of materials to use. When I'm getting ready for a class using them, I pre-sort the items in the dip tray so that I don't have to dig through the pile of lego blocks searching for one more pink one while I'm teaching. It's also great because I can just bring out the tray for that class and put them back in the closet, still sorted, until the next class when I'm using them again. Once we're done with that set of lessons, I can dump them back into the small drawer organizer with all of the legos so I can quickly find them again next time.

I've been very happy with how well my system is working so far this year, and I hope you've found some inspiration to help you cheaply and easily organize your own classroom materials. If you're curious about the items that I mentioned, check out the other blog posts that I've linked in the descriptions above- I love having these materials to use and they are also cheap and easy to get! :) Have your own organization tricks to share for keeping your classroom closet organized? Let's hear them in the comments!

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Managing All Your Kids' Artwork

If you have young children at home, you know that there seems to be an endless supply of artwork floating around, and no matter how many times you organize and purge more appears almost instantly! I always struggle with staying on top of the mountain of drawings because I want to appreciate the pictures my girls are making, and I want to make sure I'm saving a few choice pieces from each stage of their lives to look back on later, but the sheer quantity makes it difficult to find the time to sort through everything to find the ones to keep. Plus it can often be really hard to throw away something made lovingly by a 4-year-old! Although I won't say I never have piles of pictures all over my house anymore, I've come up with a system for managing all of the artwork at our house that has been helping me to keep everything more manageable.

To be honest, I don't really have time to think about what to do with all those pictures during the week- I empty out any pictures that they make at school and make one big pile for each of my daughters with all of their artwork (I do go through and take care of any paperwork that comes home on a daily basis though). Once a week (sometime over the weekend), I go through the pile with each of them to put everything away.

I essentially give my daughters 3 options for their artwork: display, dispose, or store. 

One of the key elements to making this system work is having several options for places where we can display any artwork that they want to have up. It needs to be easy to change out the artwork but also have enough space to display several things at once. I've come up with two spots in the house where we display their artwork (one in the basement and one in their bedroom). If you want to read more about either of those systems, just click on the pictures to go to the respective posts where I've described them in more detail:

The second key element is, of course, a method of storing artwork. I didn't really have anywhere for the girls to keep artwork they wanted until recently (mostly because they weren't old enough to understand the concept). After reorganizing my own closet, I was able to free up two under-the-bed sweater boxes to put under each of their beds. I told them those boxes were theirs to keep whatever they wanted- basically they are their "treasure boxes". However, I made it clear that they could only keep whatever would fit in the box and no more, so they would need to choose wisely (and may need to get rid of something else if they want to add to the box and it's already full). So far they have been very good about choosing only the most important items to keep in their box, and they have also been asking to occasionally rotate things that they have displayed in their bedroom with other things they had in their box, so I know they aren't completely forgetting what is in the boxes.

Of course the final element of the system is throwing out some of their artwork. I often will take a picture of pictures to share with family and friends beforehand (I've posted a few gems on my Instagram recently), but the girls and I are all learning to let go of a lot of those drawings that they didn't put a lot of time into instead of holding onto them forever and letting them pile up.

Having this system has made it much more manageable for us to sort through the piles of artwork and find a place for each one. I'm also hoping to go through everything that's in their boxes and on display once or twice a year to see if there's anything that's ready to be taken out of rotation. Hopefully this will help us keep everything under control, while still being able to enjoy their creativity, for the next few years!

What do you do with all the artwork your kids create? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments!

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Classroom Jobs in Elementary Music: an update

I wrote last year about the classroom jobs that I implemented in my elementary general music classes (you can read more details on what jobs I used, how I implement them with hundreds of students to teach between kindergarten and 6th grade, and why I use them, here in my last post). Today I want to introduce you to the new job I added this year: Peace Keepers. So far the students and I are enjoying the change, and I think other classrooms would benefit from having this job in their classes as well.

First of all, let me review very quickly what my jobs were and how I implement them in my classroom. When I started using classroom jobs last school year, I had 6 jobs: Clean Up, Line Leader, Supplies (passing things out), Teacher Helper, Compliment, and Attendance. I assigned each of the jobs to a group of students rather than individuals, using the color "teams" I already have set up in my classroom based on their seat (read about that in this post). This way I don't have to keep track of hundreds of students, but everyone can still have a turn on each job- I rotate the jobs every few weeks so each team ends up having one turn on each job by the end of the year. The jobs are general enough either for the whole team to do the job together (cleaning up and passing out supplies) or to take turns (line leader, teacher helper).

Out of all the jobs I used last year, my favorite by far was the job of Compliment. At the end of class, one student from the assigned team is responsible for complimenting someone not on their team on anything they want- their work in music class, their value as a friend, or even their new shoes. This has been a great practice for students and, although they were hesitant and awkward at first, they love it just as much as I do now!

I decided that this year I wanted to add more responsibility for caring for each other- more opportunities for the students to practice social skills and take part in building a positive learning community- into the classroom jobs. After thinking about it over the summer, the result was my decision to add the job of Peace Keepers. Although it was actually going OK, I got rid of the Attendance job to make room for the new one- now I just let whichever student knows where missing students are tell me, just like I did for the first decade of my teaching!

I explained the job of Peace Keeper to my students as a way for them to assist in helping students who are upset. In particular, I wanted them to be the "first line of defence" when one or two students get upset with no obvious cause. I made it very clear that they were NOT going to be mediating every misbehavior and argument (we simply don't have that kind of time), or becoming everyone's confidant. However, if a student asked to sit out of class, or was visibly upset, and I couldn't immediately talk to them to find out what was wrong, I wanted the students to be able to go and ask them if they are OK and see if there is anything that they can do for them.

So far this has worked out very well. Only a few classes have actually made use of the job- the rest haven't really needed it (which is a good thing)- but the ones that have, used it well. I still need to do a better job reminding myself to utilize those students to go and check in on students when I'm in the middle of a class activity, but when we have used the job it has been very helpful for the student who is upset, for me, and for the ones doing the helping.

I'm happy to have another way for me to encourage students to contribute to a positive learning community and develop these important social skills. It can be hard, when we get such little time with our students, to find ways to spend time on the real work of relationship-building, but these classroom jobs have been an easy way to do that without taking away from class time! If you want to read more about my thoughts on, and strategies for, behavior management, go check out this post on the topic.

Have you used classroom jobs in your music room? How did you do it? What do you do to encourage students to invest in a positive learning community? Leave your thoughts below!

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If you are considering implementing classroom jobs in your music room, make sure to check out my original post on the topic here:

Read more "Classroom Jobs in Elementary Music: an update"